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Monday, June 7, 2010

Research Trip Prep - Almost Ready To Go

Research trip time is just about here - traveling on Wednesday, researching on Thursday and Friday then attending a family reunion on Saturday. It's going to be a busy week.

I started talking about this trip a few days ago in Research Trip Prep - Getting Started when I was working on the "To Do" list, calling repositories to find out what records are available, identifying area cemeteries to visit, etc. That's all done and today I'm finishing up with printing everything that might be needed on the road.

As noted in the earlier post, I use Legacy Family Tree software and am making full use of their "To Do List" function for this trip. The to do items have been identified, prioritized, sorted by research facility and printed. Below are a couple of examples, one for a general item and one for an individual:

Each to do item is printed on a separate sheet with some blank lines for notes (you can control the number of lines and depending on how much information you have for description and results, one item can be multiple pages). When researching, I make all notes on the to do sheets so the information can be easily entered into Legacy later. Once entered, there's no need to keep the hard copy since I can find everything that's been done with a click or two.

In addition to the to do items, I've created lists for the cemeteries I want to visit, a few reports that might be needed for reference when the laptop isn't available and printed out maps and directions for repositories and cemeteries. Yes, I have a GPS and will be using it but my experience with technology says to always have a backup plan plus some of the cemeteries and areas where my ancestors lived are rural and don't have an address that can be plugged into a GPS.

Most of this information has been bound into booklets - a brilliant idea that I stole adapted from Karen over at Genealogy Frame of Mind who wrote about her research notebooks a few weeks ago (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery).

So, it looks like we are about ready to go. Yes, I said "we" - I'm not taking this trip alone.

More about that before "we" hit the road.

Disclaimer: I have no connection to Millennia (creator of Legacy Family Tree software), receive no compensation from them and did not discuss this post with anyone connected to the company. I've just loved Legacy from the first day I started using it in 2007.

2 comments:

Thanks. I'm sure we will have a great time. Probably not any tumbling bricks though - we knocked down the huge wall that was my grandfather's past last year so we are just happy to be finding out more about him and his family.

Website News

My website at www.lfmccauley.com underwent a complete redesign and move to a different platform effective 5 Jul 2014, and this blog moved to the new location. The old family tree pedigree pages have been deleted, which means older posts here will have broken links that won't be fixed anytime soon. Sorry for any inconvenience. Hope the new site is worth it. Please follow me at www.lfmccauley.com/blog.